He is supposed to be Britain’s trade emissary but instead Prince Andrew is mired in scandal over the exotic, even criminal company he keeps

T
he sun is setting on Sunninghill Park. In the weak spring light, the orange
1980s playpen that Prince Andrew bought for his bride now looks shuttered
and sad. The gates are locked; the cameras are dead; the windows are
cracked. Behind the curtains the rooms are mouldy, baths are filled with
rags. If the new owner of the house, the Kazakh oil billionaire Timur
Kulibayev, is planning renovations, he has not remotely begun.

But then, no one really expects him to. When Andrew sold the sprawling ruin
near Windsor — once dubbed Southyork for its brash similarities to the soap
opera ranch — for an astonishing £15m in 2007, many people assumed
Kulibayev’s money was little more than a gift. Even Goga Ashkenazi,
Kulibayev’s puff-lipped, fast-talking former squeeze who set up the deal,
remains vague about the fate of the pile, saying last week that “the plan is
to convert it into